Shelter in Place

A Guardian Best Book of 2016A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2016Un Revue America Meilleur Livre de l’Année

Set in the Pacific Northwest in the jittery, jacked-up early 1990s, Shelter in Place, by one of America’s most thrillingly defiant contemporary authors, is a stylish literary novel about the hereditary nature of mental illness, the fleeting intensity of youth, the obligations of family, and the dramatic consequences of love.

Joseph March, a twenty-one-year-old working class kid from Seattle, has just graduated from college and his future beckons, unencumbered, limitless, magnificent. Joe’s life implodes when he starts to suffer the symptoms of bipolar disorder, and, not long after, his mother, Anne-Marie March, beats a stranger to death with a hammer.

Joe moves to White Pine, Washington, where Anne-Marie is serving time and his father has set up house. He is followed by Tess Wolff, a fiercely independent woman with whom he is in love. Meanwhile, Joe’s mother is gradually being transformed into a national heroine. Many see her crime as a furious, exasperated act of righteous rebellion. Tess, too, is under her spell. Spurred on by Anne-Marie’s example, she enlists Joe in a secret, violent plan that will forever change their lives.

Maksik sings of modern America’s battered soul and of the lacerating emotions that make us human. Magnetic and masterfully told, Shelter in Place is about the things we are willing to die for, and those we’re willing to kill for.

Praise for SHELTER IN PLACE

“There’s something truly exhilarating about reading a novel that’s so audaciously original, so inventive and let’s be honest, so sort of weird that you want to put it in the hands of just about everyone you know. And that’s a perfect description of Alexander Maksik’s stunningly unsettling third novel, Shelter in Place.” – The San Francisco Chronicle

“Alexander Maksik’s riveting and disturbing novel Shelter in Place is a totally original exploration of mental illness, sexual politics, family and violence.” – The Guardian

“Alexander Maksik covers fresh ground with each new work. In poetic bursts…he captures [his characters’] inner convulsions while exploring the passions that can drive, and destroy, us.” – Vanity Fair

“Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order, and Shelter in Place is a sharp, dark, jagged music conjured out of poetry, pain and ecstatic bursts of beauty. This is a powerful book.” – Lauren Groff, authorof Fates and Furies and Arcadia

“An unsettling and beautiful exploration of mental illness, love, violence, family and sexual politics. Maksik’s artful story outruns all sorts of received ideas and cliched narratives, and slips into deeply original territory. You’ll be haunted by it in the best possible way.” – Katie Roiphe, authorofThe Violet Hour and In Praise of Messy Lives

“Unsettling and honest, a remarkably insightful portrait of mental illness, Shelter in Place is elegiac, savage and mournful, a beautifully written novel about the echoes of our actions, of love and its consequences.” – Aminatta Forna, authorofThe Hired Man and The Memory of Love

“Shelter In Place is a love story like none I’ve ever read before. Lust, longing, betrayal, revenge—it’s all here, but only when and where you least expect it. Densely ruminative, and bracingly unromantic, the ballad of Tess, Joe, and his parents tests the brutal outer-limits of patriarchy, the bleak realities of untreated mental illness, and the nature of loyalty in a world where every woman is out for herself. And every man, as well.” – Kate Bolick, authorofSpinster: Making a Life of One’s Own

“Shelter in Place is a magnificent novel. Alexander Maksik charts the legacy of violence and the limits of justice with grace and power.” – Anthony Marra, authorof A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno

“Shelter in Place takes a brilliant look at the fractured, jagged nature of masculinity, at how gender warps consciousness in ways we struggle and fail to understand. Maksik writes from inside the fire of a mind unfiltered, unsettled, unresigned, a mind it would be too simple to call unwell.The narrator’s episodes of mania are glittering raptures, electric; his descents into the infinite nothingness of depression drawn so true to that state of absence, of blindness, of Styron’s ‘darkness visible,’ you feel all the numb trapped terror of it. This book’s cutting, unchecked prose makes you an accomplice to violence, and leads you to realize we all are—formed and directed by cruelty, whether as victims, agents, warriors, survivors, or witnesses. Shelter in Place poses the hard, important, and perhaps unanswerable question—how do you live with your self?” – Merritt Tierce, authorof Love Me Back

A Marker to Measure Drift

Shortlisted for Le Prix du Meilleur Livre ÉtrangerA New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2013A New York Times Book Review Editor’s ChoiceFinalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for WritingA Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice

In the aftermath of Charles Taylor’s fallen regime, a young Liberian woman named Jacqueline has fled to the Aegean island of Santorini. She lives in a cave accessible only at low tide. During the day, she offers massages to tourists, battling her hunger one or two euros at a time. Her pressing physical needs provide a deeper relief, obliterating her memories of unspeakable violence.

But slowly, the specters of her former life resurface: her adoring younger sister; her unshakably proper mother; her father, who believed in his president; her journalist lover, who knew that Taylor would be overthrown. Now Jacqueline must face the ghosts that haunt her—or tip into full-blown madness. Hypnotic in its depiction of physical and spiritual hungers, this is a novel about ruin, faith, and the devastating memories can destroy and redeem us.

Praise for A MARKER TO MEASURE DRIFT

“No novel I read this year affected me more powerfully than Alexander Maksik’s A Marker to Measure Drift.” – Richard Russo

“I was so caught up in the masterfully taut and suspenseful story of this haunted and desperate young woman that it was only after I’d turned the last page that I was able to stop and consider the truly breathtaking accomplishment of this novel. How did Alexander Maksik immerse himself so convincingly in a world so entirely unlike his own, and in a character so entirely different from himself? It is work of stupendous imagination, like Dave Eggers’ What is the What, or (dare I say?) like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.” – Ayelet Waldman

“Maksik hits the mark. His writing is both stark and lyrical, subtly reflecting Jacqueline’s state of mind – wary, desolate, hallucinatory, determined. Maksik’s last ten pages, a masterclass in how to captivate and revolt a reader, may well be the most powerful I will read all year” – Malcom Forbes, Literary Review

“Maksik has produced a bold book, and an instructive one . . .[he] has illuminated for us with force and art an all too common species of suffering – grievous, ugly and, unfortunately, a perennial.” – Norman Rush, The New York Times Book Review

“A fever dream of a novel . . . One might linger over most of this book, rereading particularly beautiful passages. Yet the ending is so compelling and visceral that one rushes until the fever breaks, dazed and haunted by its power.” – Chicago Tribune, Editor’s Choice

“Poetic, often mesmerizing . . . faultlessly lyrical . . . A Marker to Measure Drift is about compassion; perhaps it’s even a masterclass in compassion . . . Maksik does not take sides or make judgments. He is simply aware that his job as a novelist is to talk to us about something that we ought to know . . . And to move us deeply in the process.” – The Sydney Morning Herald

“Maksik emerges with something stark and essential. . . No doubt he still faces obstacles in his work, missteps and uncertainty from day to day. A book in print doesn’t cure all ills. With A Marker to Measure Drift, though, Alexander Maksik’s deep belief proves warranted: he has succeeded.” – The Millions

“Haunting and sensual, Maksik’s prose deftly intertwines the tenderness and torment of memory with the hard reality of searching for sustenance and shelter.” – Harper’s

“Beautiful . . . It will leave you breathless and speechless; it will send you reeling.” – The San Francisco Chronicle

“Immensely powerful . . . Beautifully written . . . Jacqueline is a mesmerizing heroine . . . She is alive on the page from the outset, and with each paragraph she deepens, grows more complicated. Clearer and yet more mysterious . . . Maksik brings Jacqueline’s tale to a devastating finale . . . giving her quest an awful and moving dignity.” – The Boston Globe

“Luminous . . . Maksik is both deft and lyrical, a master of tense—his shifts from past to present and back again are nearly invisible, so appropriate do they feel—and a sensualist, and it is impossible to read Marker with less than total attention . . . Maksik’s brilliance is evident in his ability to keep the novel’s stripped-down cast and plot so riveting.” – Winnipeg Free Press

“Moving, painful and beautiful. It will change you.” – Booklist

“A masterpiece . . . Maksik manages to accomplish in Marker something next to no one has managed to do, namely, to strip the world down to naked life, life in all its glory and all its agony and terror, and death . . . Maksik’s prose floats weightlessly and then falls like a fist on the table.” – The Buenos Aires Review

“A moving, deeply felt and lyrical novel.” – Kirkus (starred review)

“A Marker to Measure Drift is a haunting, haunted novel. Things get stripped down to essentials–food, water, where to sleep for the night, a state of solitary desperation brought on by the most profound kind of loss. Every line of this excellent novel rings true as Maksik leads us toward the catastrophe at the story’s core. This is one of those books that leaves you staring into space when you finish, dazed from the sheer power of what’s been said.” – Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

“Gorgeously written, tightly wound, with language as precise as cut glass, Alexander Maksik’s A Marker to Measure Drift is a tour de force. Maksik renders the soul of his heroine, a Liberian refugee, with stark honesty so that we understand both the brutality of what she has run from and the terror she experiences as she tries to build her life back. I was undone by this novel. I challenge anyone to read it and not come away profoundly changed.” – Marisa Silver, author of Mary Coin and The God of War

“A Marker to Measure Drift is spellbinding. In its tenderness, grandeur and austerity, it reminds us that there is no country on earth as foreign, as unreachable, as the frantic soul of another human being.” – Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters

“A mesmerising novel about a woman pushed to the limits of human experience. Maksik combines James Salter’s gift for seductive sentences with a real mastery of character and story. A beautiful, tender piece of literature which just happens to be a page-turner too.” – Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive

You Deserve Nothing

A New York Times BestsellerAn IndieBound Bestseller

Set in Paris, at an international high school catering to the sons and daughters of wealthy, influential families, You Deserve Nothing is a gripping story of power, idealism, and morality. In Maksik’s stylish prose, Paris is sensual, dazzling and dangerously seductive. It serves as a fitting backdrop for a dramatic tale about the tension between desire and action, and about the complex relationship that exists between our public and private selves.

Praise for YOU DESERVE NOTHING

“A novel rivetingly plotted and beautifully written. . . [Maksik] writes about the moral ambiguity of Will’s circumstances with dazzling clarity and impressive philosophical rigor.” — The New York Times

“Maksik, in his account of adolescent yearning and grown-up fallibility, does something like what Hemingway did in his non-debut memoir, “A Moveable Feast” – he vividly evokes a destination for generations of foreign seekers.” —The San Francisco Chronicle

“While comparisons with Donna Tartt and J D Salinger are apt given the high school setting and philosophical digressions, it’s Ian McEwan who comes most readily to mind. Maksik’s Paris is brilliantly sketched and demythologized. YOU DESERVE NOTHING arrives with a fanfare of acclaim. Alexander Maksik proves himself a worthy recipient of this attention.” — The Times Literary Supplement

“A suberb debut novel.” — The Sunday Times

“With writing that is reminiscent of James Salter’s in its sensuality, Francine Prose’s capacious inquiry into difficult moral questions and Martin Amis’s loose-limbed evocation of the perils of youth, Maksik brings us back to that point in all our lives when character is molten, integrity elusive and beauty unbearably thrilling.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Largely a character study of Will Silver, master teacher at the International School of France in Paris, the novel advances its narrative through multiple perspectives, much as Faulkner does in As I Lay Dying . . . Both intelligent and intellectual, [You Deserve Nothing] is both a tribute to brilliant teachers and a cautionary tale of their imperfections.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“One of the most engaged reads I’ve had in years.” —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

Alexander Maksik deftly evokes the beauty and pathos of Paris, and the story of Will, Gilad and Marie-each compelled towards moral and sexual awakening- is at once dark and luminous. This is a book to be read all at once with a glass of wine in a café or a cup of tea while tucked safely in bed” —A.M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven

“You Deserve Nothing is a powerful, absorbing novel and Alexander Maksik is an unusually gifted writer.” —Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children, Election, and The Leftovers

“The phrase ‘brilliant debut’ is much overused in our world, but Alexander Maksik’s You Deserve Nothing is truly one of those rarest of creatures, a brilliant debut. Maksik’s superb novel takes on the most fundamental question–how are we supposed to live?–with a freshness and urgency that are nothing short of masterful. This is a gorgeous, troubling, unflinching book, as honest and rich a depiction of life’s contradictions as I’ve encountered in many years.” —Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara